Good Bad Woman. Elizabeth Woodcraft
rest of her Christmas shopping in Colchester. By the time I tipped her and her case and bags of flowers into the train at Liverpool Street I was sorry to see her go.
‘I tell you what,’ I said, ‘why don’t I ask him out for you?’
‘Oh, Frankie, you can’t,’ she said. ‘Have you got his number?’
‘Yes, I have, and I shall ring him tomorrow and tell him there’s a perfectly formed woman in Colchester who would like to go and see The Return of Martin Guerre with him, to discuss whether he did it by plastic surgery.’
She giggled with pleasure. ‘I have no pride,’ she said. ‘Do it if you must.’
As I walked away from the platform and went into W. H. Smith’s to buy the Observer I realised that my headache wasn’t just a hangover, I was getting a cold.
I rang Lena and we went to Hampstead to see a revamped copy of Bringing Up Baby. I had to go out halfway through the film to buy a packet of tissues and by the end my nose was streaming.
‘You should go home and have a hot toddy,’ Lena said.
‘Would hot whisky have the same effect?’ I sniffed. ‘I don’t think I’ve got the other ingredients.’
Lena ordered me to stop the car at the corner of her street while she went into the Italian shop and came back with three lemons and a jar of honey.
‘Go to bed,’ she said, thrusting them on to the seat, ‘I’ll walk from here.’
It was only seven o’clock when I turned into Amhurst Road. My head was aching and I was sneezing every thirty seconds. A car drove away from outside my house just as I was slowing down to a crawl, looking for a parking space. It’s like a small but precious gift when you can park outside your own home in London. I switched off the engine and the voice of Paul McCartney singing ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ disappeared abruptly. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed something that I knew was significant, but I was so busy concentrating on turning the car key the right way up to lock the door, smooth side up for driver’s door, smooth side down for passenger door, that I didn’t think.
As I walked up the steps to the front door I looked over at my bay window, the half-drawn white blinds gleaming in the darkness. In the darkness – that was it, the window was dark. It shouldn’t have been dark, the lamp on the timer in the living room didn’t go off till one o’clock.
‘Bloody long-life bloody light bulbs,’ I muttered, juggling the bag of lemons and honey, scrabbling in my pocket for the key.
The door swung open and I stepped into the hall. I lifted my hand to press the communal timer switch and sneezed at the same time. The bag fell from my hand and lemons and honey escaped across the floor. As I picked them up in the silence I could hear the timer switch wheezing its way slowly out again. I was shoving the jar of honey back into the bag when the timer gave a final sigh and the light went out and I realised my front door was open.
Tentatively I pushed the door and slid my hand round the door frame to switch on the light in my hall. As light flooded into the living room, it was clear the room was empty. It was also completely untidy. Papers strewn on the floor, newspaper tossed on the sofa, cups knocked over on the carpet. Or was that just how I’d left it before I went out?
I went over to my table. The desk drawers were open and the papers in them looked messy. That could mean anything.
Then I saw it, in the middle of the desk, on top of my laptop: a card. It said, ‘Make love, not sausages.’
‘Saskia!’ I said. ‘Saskia?’ I walked through into the kitchen and switched on the light. ‘Saskia?’ The kitchen was empty. ‘Saskia?’ I walked back through to the bedroom and opened the door. The bed was empty.
I looked down at the card in my hand. I turned it over. On the back were the words, ‘It was too easy to get into your flat, you should do something about security,’ written in a small, tight hand as if she was anxious about what she was writing. And so she should be, breaking into people’s homes.
I walked back into the living room, wondering whether I should ring Kay, or even the police about Saskia’s visit. I immediately rejected the option of the police. Burglary of domestic premises was a serious offence. Not that it was burglary. It was Saskia. But the police might look at it differently. And I was more than happy that Saskia should come into my home at any hour of the night or day, to have a bath, help herself to a bowl of ice cream from the freezer, or even something more substantial. I just wish she’d stayed. I needed to talk to her.
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